The most common approach to room scheduling is to start with a fixed timetable of classes and attempt to place all unscheduled activities into acceptable rooms. There are a couple of major problems with this approach:

1. Managing “pre-assignments” of rooms can be challenging – Do some room assignments roll forward with the meeting patterns? Are they based on the seniority of the instructor? Are there objective criteria (equipment needed, capacity needed, a location correlating to student availability) that are used? The central scheduling office is frequently placed in the middle of this difficult situation.
2. Proactively assessing the feasibility of the schedule – Room scheduling is so complicated that you typically don’t know if you have a problem until you are near the end of the elusive solution. Only then does it become apparent that there are some activities that can’t be placed. Concessions – such as moving activities to less desirable rooms or times – must then be made to schedule the “leftover” courses. Institutions that use a room scheduling optimization tool should have fewer unassigned activities and a more equitable leftover list, but they are still left to deal with leftovers with few viable time/room options.

I’ll continue this discussion next week with a discussion of the proper role of space utilization reporting in the space management game.